CoinsPaid blames North Korea-linked APT Lazarus for theft of $37M worth of cryptocurrency

Crypto-payments service provider CoinsPaid suffered a cyber attack that resulted in the theft of $37,200,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

CoinsPaid, a crypto-payment service provider, fell victim to a cyber attack, leading to the theft of $37,200,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

The company attributes the cyber heist to the North Korea-linked APT Lazarus, which is also responsible for the attacks against Axie Infinity (USD 625M), Horizon Bridge (USD 100M), Atomic Wallet (USD 100M) and Alphapo (USD 23M). The company did not share technical details of the attack either evidence that link the theft to Lazarus’ operations.

“On July 22nd, CoinsPaid experienced a hacker attack, resulting in the theft of USD 37.3M.” reads the announcement published by the company. “We believe Lazarus expected the attack on CoinsPaid to be much more successful.”

The crypto-payment service provider pointed out that the security breach did not impact client funds and that it ensures their availability to customers. However, the attack impacted the availability of the platform of CoinsPaid its revenue.

The company set up an incident response team that is investigating the security breach and is working to fortify its systems.

“After the partial downtime, our services are getting up and running one by one in the new secured environment. We expect it to take a few more days to sort out minor details and ensure the system works smoothly”, underlines Max Krupyshev, CoinsPaid CEO. “We have no doubt the hackers won’t escape justice,” adds Max Krupyshev.

Krupyshev confirmed that blockchain security firms and crypto-exchanges are supporting its company to mitigate the incident, including Chainalysis, Binance, Crystal, Match Systems, Staked.us, OKCoinJapan, and Valkyrieinvest. The company notified Estonian law enforcement authorities that launched an investigation too.

Within a few weeks, CoinsPaid plans to organize a round table with all the Lazarus victims to share information about the attack and prevent such attacks in the future.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Lazarus)